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Jonathan Tennis

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Jonathan is Currently Reading

Jonathan Tennis is currently reading

A Year of Self Love Journal (A Year of Reflections Journal)

by Jamila I. White

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Jan 02, 2026 10:00AM

Jonathan Tennis is currently reading

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck Journal

by Mark Manson (Goodreads Author)

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Jan 02, 2026 10:00AM

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I Really Needed This Today: Words to Live By

by Hoda Kotb

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Jan 02, 2026 09:59AM

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Jonathan’s Notes & Highlights

Book cover for The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers

The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers by Maxwell King

6 highlights

Key to the success of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood was Rogers’s iron insistence upon meeting the highest standards without qualification. So painstaking was Fred Rogers’s approach that some of his friends and coworkers came to refer to ...more

Fugitive Son: A Memoir

by Aramis Calderon

39 highlights
The Comfort Book

by Matt Haig

48 highlights

See Jonathan Tennis’s 53 books with notes and highlights…

Jonathan’s Quotes

“There is not always a good guy. Nor is there always a bad one. Most people are somewhere in between.”
― Patrick Ness, A Monster Calls

4084 likes

“You do not write your life with words...You write it with actions. What you think is not important. It is only important what you do.”
― Patrick Ness, A Monster Calls

tags: philosophy, wisdom

5920 likes

“Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

tags: darlings, deleting, editing, kill, revising, writing

831 likes

“Go back?" he thought. "No good at all! Go sideways? Impossible! Go forward? Only thing to do! On we go!" So up he got, and trotted along with his little sword held in front of him and one hand feeling the wall, and his heart all of a patter and a pitter.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again

tags: courage, moving-forward, perseverance

949 likes

“Returning home is the most difficult part of long-distance hiking; You have grown outside the puzzle and your piece no longer fits.”
― Cindy Ross

tags: hiking, homecoming, journey, life, philosophy

186 likes

More of Jonathan’s quotes…

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Jonathan’s Groups

Goodreads Librarians Group — 306579 members — last activity 0 minutes ago
Goodreads Librarians are volunteers who help ensure the accuracy of information about books and authors in the Goodreads' catalog. The Goodreads Libra ...more

¡ POETRY ! — 22582 members — last activity Dec 24, 2025 01:37PM
No pretensions: just poetry. Stop by, recommend books, offer up poems (excerpted), tempt us, taunt us, tell us what to read and where to go (to read No pretensions: just poetry. Stop by, recommend books, offer up poems (excerpted), tempt us, taunt us, tell us what to read and where to go (to read it!) Goodreads honors wordsmiths: poets and poetry promoted and prompted here. ~~~ "Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits." -- Carl Sandburg “God has a brown voice, as soft and full as beer.” —Anne Sexton On Clouds – “…what primitive tastes the ancients must have had if their poets were inspired by those absurd, untidy clumps of mist, idiotically jostling one another about…” —Yevgeny Zamyatin “If the poet wants to be a poet, the poet must force the poet to revise. If the poet doesn’t wish to revise, let the poet abandon poetry and take up stamp-collecting or real estate.” —Donald Hall “Poetry is a rich, full-bodied whistle, cracked ice crunching in pails, the night that numbs the leaf, the duel of two nightingales, the sweet pea that has run wild, Creation’s tears in shoulder blades.” —Boris Pasternak “Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket.” —Charles Simic “Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.” —Gustave Flaubert “Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It’s that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that’s what the poet does.” —Allen Ginsberg. ~~~~~ Amy King, Moderator Amy King is the recipient of the 2015 Winner of the WNBA Award (Women’s National Book Association). Her latest collection, The Missing Museum, is a winner of the 2015 Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize. She serves on the executive board of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts and is co-editing with Heidi Lynn Staples the anthology, Big Energy Poets of the Anthropocene: When Ecopoets Think Climate Change. She is also co-editing the anthology, Bettering American Poetry 2015, and is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at SUNY Nassau Community College. ...more